


But Never The Hurricane

by zeitheist



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Coming of Age, Gen, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-23
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-18 13:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2350412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeitheist/pseuds/zeitheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Peter Quill at ten years old is a small, shivering figure, in the stripped-down storeroom of a Ravager ship.</i>
</p><p>Peter Quill in three stages. Pre-movie fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But Never The Hurricane

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that whilst this isn't a dark fic, the first section contains a couple of brief mentions of violence against a child as well as a child trying to come to terms with his mother's death by cancer, both of which could conceivably be triggering for some readers. Please use your discretion if you're sensitive to either of these scenarios.

Peter Quill at ten years old is a small, shivering figure, in the stripped-down storeroom of a Ravager ship.

They’d taken his backpack and his jacket when they brought him aboard, and left him with nothing more than a bucket and a blanket for comfort. The bucket had disappeared after he threw it at the door. The blankets had been taken away after he tried to use them to distract his jailors. Now Peter is escorted at gunpoint to use the toilet, and sleeps badly on the cold metal floor, if he sleeps at all. The ship is full of unfamiliar sounds that keep him awake: the low, constant rumble of what he guesses is an engine, the sound of booted feet stomping back and forth outside his door. Everything smells like sweat and dirt, the faint bitter tang of hot pennies. Even the air tastes wrong, thin and metallic on his tongue.

He had screamed a lot at first. After they took his backpack away, he had hammered on the door and howled until his fists and throat were raw. Nobody had come to tell him to shut up, and eventually he had stopped trying. The men who bring him food twice a day don’t try to talk to him, nor do the ones who come to frogmarch him to the bathroom.

Occasionally, he catches someone looking at him through the slit in the top of the door.

Sometimes there’s more than one of them. Sometimes, he hears them laughing.

He doesn’t look up when the door opens. In his first few days he had rushed whoever came through it, fuelled by fury and desperation. Most of them had shoved him aside as if he was nothing. Some of them had opted to grab him around the waist and lift him clean off the floor, throwing him aside as if he were a bundle of straw. One unkempt-looking man hadn’t even said anything, had just hit Peter with the back of his hand so hard that he drew blood.

Peter hasn’t seen that guy since, and he can’t say he misses him all that much.

He focuses on not crying. He will not cry. _He will not cry_.

Most of the people who bring Peter’s meals just leave them by the door, but whoever this is crosses the room with a heavy tread. Peter draws a shuddery breath and braces himself for whatever new punishment his captors are going to mete out. He keeps his head down. Part of him wants to keep his head held high and defiant, but another part of him, the part of him that has spent a lifetime getting the shit kicked out of him, knows what a bad idea that is. He vaguely remembers a documentary about gorillas where eye-contact was seen as a threat; the researchers kept their heads down to avoid angering the beasts.

Peter doesn’t want to anger these guys. His jaw still aches from last time.

There’s a rustle as somebody crouches down next to him. Then, a long, drawn-out sigh.

“My boys tell me you’ve not been eating.”

The guy doesn’t follow this up by clipping Peter around the ear, so Peter forgets his rule about not looking and raises his head enough to glare. “What’s it to you?” he says, sullenly.

The guy isn’t the weirdest-looking thing Peter has seen on this ship so far. That’s probably the only reason why he doesn’t even flinch; he got used to the blue-skinned dudes on his first day. They all seem to have a red ridge on the top of their head, hard and dark-looking, like a cut gemstone. _Aliens_ , Peter thinks, somewhat sagely.

Whoever he is, _what_ ever he is, the guy smiles with a mouthful of jagged teeth. “Ain’t no skin off my nose,” he says, with a shrug. “If you don’t want to eat, that’s your problem. It’s just that food is mighty scarce on a ship like this, and we’re wasting it on you. Some of my boys are starting to get a mite upset about that. They’re telling me we should cut our losses and eat you instead.”

Peter didn’t realize it was possible for him to feel colder. “Eat me?”

“They ain’t never had Terran before,” the guy says, like it’s a secret.

Peter will not cry. He _will not cry_. He sucks his lower lip in until the pain cuts through him, sharp and hot enough to overwhelm the prickling in his eyes. He puts his forehead back against his knees, though. Just in case.

There’s a long pause from his captor, followed by sigh so deeply explosive that it ruffles the short hairs on the back of Peter’s neck. He flinches as his captor shifts around, his leathers creaking. He braces in anticipation of a blow - these guys haven’t been so fond of Peter’s attitude so far - but it never comes. Instead, there’s just a deep and eerie silence, broken only by the hum of the ship. The stranger begins to whistle from somewhere nearby, but very quietly, like he doesn’t want to disturb Peter with the noise.

Curiosity gets the better of Peter, as it always does. He lifts his head, and his breath catches in his throat when he realizes his captor is sitting against the wall next to him, head tipped back towards the ceiling. The ridge on his head is glowing slightly, a bright cherry red.

He looks for all the world like a regular guy just hanging out, rather than what he actually is, which is a kidnapper, an alien and, if what he said is to be believed, a murderer.

 _Why?_ Peter wants to demand. Why abduct him, lock him away, and then sit with him like his grandpa used to, back when they first found out about mom’s cancer?

At the thought of his mom, Peter’s lower lip trembles, and he sucks it between his teeth once more, pinching until it bleeds. He will not cry. _He will not cry he will not cry he will not cry--_

He’s going to miss her funeral. The thought of his mom being lowered into the cold, dark ground without Peter there makes him feel sick and shaky. What if she’s scared? What if she needs him? What if she thinks he’s abandoned her?

It’s a silly, childish thing to think. His mum isn’t capable of feeling scared - she’s _dead_.

“Where’s my stuff?” Peter croaks.

His captor glances at him. He seems surprised. “You mean that junk you came aboard with?”

“It wasn’t junk!” Peter shouts, before he can stop himself. “What did you do with it?!” Images of his mom’s gift being pawed over by the hands of these filthy aliens, of his walkman being passed between them, the songs ridiculed, rise in his head like bile. He realizes that he’s shaking, clenches his fists in an effort to still the tremors.

His captor is looking at him oddly now, like he can’t understand why Peter is getting so upset. “What do you think we’d do with it? It ain’t no value to us. Now if you could stop tossing shit around, we could maybe even let you have it back. How does that sound?” He sounds kind, like a man offering a tidbit to a hungry animal.

Peter hesitates. It’s a trap. It has to be a trap. No way could these guys be… be _nice_ , or _reasonable_.

But long moments pass, and nobody leaps out with a _gotcha_ , or tries to pummel Peter into the floor. Eventually, he tries a hesitant: “Good. That sounds… that sounds good.”

“We ain’t so bad. You’d learn that, if you stop fussin’ like a child all the damn time.”

“You kidnapped me,” Peter’s voice is as low a growl as a ten-year-old child’s could go, and it trembles alarmingly with the oncoming tears. “One of you hit me. I hate it here. I want to go home. I want to see--” he stops, and his breath catches like water in the back of his throat, choking him, drowning him.

 _I want to see my mom_ , he thinks. But he can’t see his mom. He can’t see his mom ever again.

There’s nothing in the world that can stop Peter from crying after that.

He manages to bury his face in his knees in time to stop his captor from seeing, but he can’t contain the sobs that rattle their way around his chest, forcing their way up through his throat like sick. Deep, wet, wracking sobs, the same kind of grief that had folded him up on the grass just outside the hospital.

“Aw, hell.”

A hand, big and warm, lands on the back of his head. It doesn’t make Peter feel any better. On the contrary, it makes him feel _worse_. He sobs harder, and curls further into himself, in the vague, animal hope that his captor will get the hint and go away. _Leave me alone_ , he thinks. Then, as the hand on his head shifts slightly like it might disappear, a blurt of pure panic takes over: _Please, don’t leave me alone._

“Do all Terran kids whine this much?” his captor says. He sounds annoyed, which of course just makes Peter’s grief all that acute. “Or is it just you?”

Suddenly, Peter doesn’t care about keeping his grief a secret.

“My mom is _dead_ ,” he snarls. “She _died_ and I barely got to say goodbye and then you _took me away_ and now I’m never gonna see her again and she’s gonna think I _left_ her, they’re all gonna think I _left_ her and--”

The hand on the back of Peter’s head grips, fingers curling around his neck. “Calm the fuck down,” its owner growls, with just enough of an implied threat that Peter does exactly that. He’s shocked enough to stop sobbing, and for a moment he stares at his knees, eyes wide and breath stuttering in his throat.

Nobody has ever talked to him like that before. His mom would comfort him when he was crying, with hugs and kisses and croons of, _oh, my little man, my darling boy_. Nobody has ever done this before, snapped him out of his grief as if by a physical blow.

“I’m sorry about your mom, kid,” his captor says, and he doesn’t _sound_ very sorry. He sounds like he couldn't care less. “Believe me on that. But you ain’t gonna see her again, whether or not you’re here or back on Terra. She’s gone. Sooner you accept that, the better.”

Peter swallows thickly against the rising panic. “Are you going to kill me?”

His captor actually looks insulted. “What? No! What kind of criminal do you think I am?”

“You said you were going to eat me,” Peter mumbles reproachfully, though he shrinks away.

“And just what would be the point of going to all this trouble, just to eat you?”

“I don’t know.” At his captor’s look, Peter flushes with embarrassment. “I _don’t_. You’re an alien.”

Far from being insulted, his captor actually chuckles. “You’re the only Terran on this ship. Technically, I guess that makes _you_ the alien.”

Peter isn’t convinced. He tries to think back to what he knows about aliens, but it’s not much. His mom let him watch _Star Wars_ , but none of the aliens in that look anything like the ones he’s met so far. He’s not sure if this is a comfort or not: he had nightmares about sand raiders for weeks after he watched that movie. These aliens are both better and worse. Better because they’re not rag-wrapped monsters screaming through round, toothy maws, and worse because they’re _real_ , whereas Peter’s mom had eventually managed to convince him that sand raiders were fake.

What if they weren’t, though? “Are sand raiders real?” he blurts.

“What? Sand raiders? What the hell are those?”

“I saw them in a movie once. Are they?”

“I ain’t never heard of no ‘sand raider’,” his captor says, somewhat dubiously.

Peter relaxes. “Okay,” he says. “Good.”

His captor is still looking at Peter oddly. “Watch a lot of movies about space, did you?”

Peter shrugs. “Some,” he says. He’s not sure why he’s offering this information, like a toy handed over to the popular kid in the hopes that he won’t beat Peter up. “I liked _Star Trek_. My... my mom wouldn’t let me watch _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_. Said it was too grown-up, that it scared her too.” The thought of his mom in happier times makes Peter’s eyes prickle again, and he sniffles and rubs at them with a filthy sleeve. “I miss her.”

His captor doesn’t say anything in response to this, and Peter isn’t sure if he’s grateful or not. “ _Star **Trek**_? You guys sure are optimistic, for a species that’s only just made it out to your own moon.”

The open scorn in his tone is enough to make Peter frown. “Which planet are you from?”

“Why don’t you guess?”

Peter hesitates, but he doesn’t sense a trap. His captor looks warmly amused, and even if it’s at Peter’s expense, he’ll take that over being threatened. He eyes the alien for a moment before deciding on a likely candidate: “Mars?”

“Nope.”

“... Saturn?”

“Nope.”

Peter frowns. “... Pluto?”

For a moment, his captor looks confused. “Pluto ain’t a planet.”

“I’m pretty sure it is.”

“Says who?”

“Uh, everyone?”

“On Terra, you mean.”

Peter says nothing. Suddenly, the authority of his elementary school teacher seems very, very small next to an actual alien, who presumably knows more about space than Miss Davis will ever forget. On the other hand, that would mean admitting that this alien is _right_ , which is just unacceptable.

“It is too a planet.”

The body next to him shakes. Peter looks up immediately, but his captor is just laughing.

“That’s cute,” he says. “That’s real cute.” With a slight groan, he pushes himself to his feet. Sand flakes off from his clothes; Peter watches it fall like a fine snow and thinks, _that’s alien dirt, from an alien planet_. For a moment he feels like he’s just stepped into a very, _very_ big room, and his head swims with the new sense of perspective.

He startles when a grimy blue hand appears in front of his face.

“Come on, boy,” his captor says. “I want to show you something.”

Five minutes later, Peter is standing in the cockpit of a real-life spaceship, staring out at the vast, dark expanse of space. There are stars everywhere, like someone took a sheet of the blackest cardboard and spattered it with white paint. Somewhere to their right, Peter can see a delicate swirl of light that looks a little bit like the inside of a Twinkie. To their left is a planet that doesn’t resemble anything he’s ever seen in his books, a marble-like sphere of soft pinks and purples.

He’s aware of the crew of the ship watching him: some of them with amusement, others smirking unkindly, and a few glaring at him in outright resentment. Some of them had startled as they saw Peter walking through the ship, but his captor had waved them off with one hand. The other, he had kept placed on Peter’s back, either to propel him forwards or to remind him not to run.

Peter isn’t going to run. Where would he go? They’re in the middle of _nowhere_.

There are probably less than twenty people on the entire _planet_ who have gone into space, and now Peter is one of them. Would be one of them. If he was still on Earth.

“Captain,” one of the crew says, still eyeing Peter with something that’s either dislike or hunger. Peter thinks he might be the one that hit him that one time, though it’s difficult to tell when he doesn’t want to take his eyes off the scene in front of him. “Not that I’m questionin’ your judgement or something, but is it really a good idea--”

“See, that sounds to me like you’re questionin’ my judgement,” Peter’s captor - the captain - says. If he had sounded threatening when he spoke to Peter earlier, it’s nothing on how he sounds now. “You might want to work on that.”

Something zips past their ship, and Peter flinches before he realizes that it’s _another_ spaceship. It’s nothing like the sleek inventions that he’s seen in movies; it’s filthy and battered, little more than a pile of scrap metal. More Millenium Falcon than Starship Enterprise. But it moves fast enough to get out in front of them, before banking sharply to the right and arcing back and underneath them, like an animal circling around its mother. Peter cranes his head to watch it go.

“What do you think?” the captain asks.

Peter’s mouth is dry. He swallows some moisture into it, but it still takes him several tries to talk.

“Where’s Earth?” he asks.

The crew snigger, but the captain just smirks.

“Terra,” he says, very quietly, “is about three star systems behind us.”

Three star systems. Three whole star systems. Peter isn’t just in space, he’s in a part of space that nobody on Earth even knows _exists_ , let alone has explored. NASA have never been up here with their sleek space shuttles and their plastic flags. The movies could only imagine it. Everyone Peter knows is three star systems behind him. The kids who blackened his eye at school that day, the teachers who tutted over him sympathetically, the people he’d never met who turned up at his mom’s bedside and looked at him with that awful pity, like there was something wrong with _him_. His grandpa. His grandpa’s house, which he’d had to move into after his mom went into hospital, and which didn’t have any of his favourite toys or snacks or places to hide. His mom. His mom’s disease.

“New plan, boys,” says the captain, and he sounds pleased about something. “We're holding on to the goods a while longer.”

It isn't until years later that Peter realizes that Yondu had been referring to  _him_.

 

* * *

 

Peter Quill at fifteen years old is standing in front of Yondu like a guilty child, trying not to drip blood on the floor of the cockpit. Not that it would matter if he did, since Yondu’s ship is already filthy. But Peter senses he’s already in trouble, and bleeding everywhere isn’t exactly going to help his case. Luckily in the time it took Kraglin to drag Peter in front of Yondu, the flow has slowed enough that Peter can catch most of it in his cupped hand. Clothes that fit a fifteen-year-old boy are hard to come by out in space, especially one shaped like Peter, and he doesn’t really want to ruin his shirt by using his sleeve. He snorts inelegantly, trying to alleviate some of the stiff, stuffed-up sensation in his nose.

Somewhere in front of him, Yondu sighs. Peter doesn’t look up. He glares down at the floor like it’s responsible for all his current problems, and tries to ignore the hot throbbing in his left eye that suggests he shouldn’t get too attached to being able to see about it in the immediate future.

“Alright,” Yondu says. “What was it this time?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” mutters Peter.

“Don’t give me that shit. What did you do?”

Outraged, Peter looks up at last. “Why does it have to be me who did _anything_?” he cries. His voice peaks slightly on the words and Kraglin, for whom Peter’s messy slide into puberty has been a constant source of amusement, sniggers loudly. _Jerk_.

“Because it’s _always_ you,” Yondu snaps back, not angry but exasperated. “You got a smart mouth and no idea how to use it, and lately you’ve been more trouble than the rest of this crew put together.”

“Well maybe I’d have an idea of how to use it if you let me go on jobs!”

Now it’s Yondu’s turn to look outraged. “I _do_ let you go on jobs!”

“Yeah, the _boring_ ones!”

By now, Yondu is so angry that his face is rapidly turning purple. Peter knows he has another thirty seconds before Yondu starts whistling.

“That’s… you can’t… that ain’t the problem here!” Yondu points one long, slightly grubby finger at Peter. “The point is that this is the third time this week that Kraglin has found you getting the shit kicked out of you in the cargo bay.”

“I wasn’t… I wasn’t getting the shit kicked out of me,” Peter yowls. “I was winning!”

Kraglin barks out of a laugh, which he quickly tries to cover with his fist when Yondu and Peter turn to glare at him.

It’s no secret that most of Yondu’s crew find Peter’s increasingly frequent temper tantrums to be hilarious rather than genuinely frightening, which of course doesn’t help Peter’s mood any. The crux of the issue, however, is that Yondu won’t send Peter out on any jobs.

Well, okay, that’s not strictly true. Yondu has been sending Peter out on jobs since he was a kid, because everyone in the Ravager fleet has to earn their keep. Besides, as Yondu had confidently told an initially dubious ten-year-old Peter, it’s important for him to learn the ropes as early as possible, since one day he’d be doing this stuff for real.

Except he _isn’t_ doing this stuff for real, that’s the _problem_. The jobs that Yondu has sent him on have mostly been small-time, involving a lot of long, boring trade negotiations and some heavy chaperoning. Yondu had allowed Peter to join on a heist job once and only once, which Peter had been excited about until he learned that he was part of the group standing guard, not the one doing the actual stealing. Even then, the crew had gone to great lengths to ensure that Peter was kept away from any kind of action - it had been all _stand there, Quill_ and _don’t make any noise, Quill_ and _don’t shoot that ornamental flower planter, Quill._

Peter is fifteen years old, not _five_. It’s so unfair.

“This is so _unfair_ ,” he says.

Yondu’s mouth purses like he’s just eaten something sour. “You know,” he says, “if you’re trying to get me to take you seriously as a person, this ain’t really the way to go about it.”

“You already don’t take me seriously as a person! That’s the problem!”

“Hey, I take you plenty seriously!” Yondu seems mighty outraged at being accused of having done something that he’s actually guilty of. “I don’t make fun of your attachment to that stupid music player, for example.” He nods in the direction of the walkman, before belatedly seeming to notice that it isn’t strapped to its customary place on Peter’s hip. “Aw, hell. Don’t tell me this is because somebody lifted that piece of junk from you again.”

“It’s not _junk_ ,” Peter shouts, loudly enough that Kraglin winces.

Yondu, who has more experience enduring Peter’s temper, merely pinches the skin between his eyes and groans. “Boy, how many times do I have to tell you, if you don’t want them to realize how much it means to you then you shouldn’t be carrying it around all the time--”

“ _They think you’re soft on me!_ ”

In the ringing silence that follows, Peter thinks that maybe, just maybe, he shouldn’t have said that. Potentially he shouldn’t have shouted it loudly enough that the entire crew now knows that he’s squealed on them to the captain. Even Kraglin has gone from finding the situation hilarious to looking a little bit strangled. Yondu, meanwhile, just looks like he’s thinking of hitting something, which is the entire reason Peter didn’t want to tell him in the first place.

Ah well, he thinks. In for a unit.

“They think you’re going easy on me.” Peter can’t look at Yondu as he says this, so instead he glances over at a poster on the wall of the cockpit, featuring an alien of indeterminate age, gender, and state of dress. “Because I can’t handle the important stuff. Because I’m just a kid.”

He glances up when Yondu moves, but his captain only picks up a glass of something viscous and luminously red-brown and downs it in one swallow. Peter, who had once tried to steal Yondu’s drink and had nearly burned a hole in his throat, has to fight the urge to run forwards and knock the glass out of Yondu’s hand. He doesn’t think it’d be well-received. Yondu’s mouth is twisted, not in distaste for his frankly disgusting beverage, but in unhappiness.

Peter has no idea if Yondu is unhappy with the crew, or unhappy with _him_.

He hopes it isn’t with him. He doesn’t mean to fight, and the idea of Yondu being disappointed with him brings back bitter, stinging memories of the way his grandpa had looked at him every time he came home bloodied and bruised. Violence is never the answer, he _knows_ that. The problem is that Peter is beginning to understand how the Ravagers operate, and not stepping up to a challenge when it’s thrown at him… well, he’d paint a target on his back so large it’d take _years_ to undo.

“Yondu, man,” he says, with a note of pleading. “Please.”

Yondu looks like he’s gritting his teeth against whatever he wants to say.

Peter waits, breathless, in limbo.

Until finally:

“Fine,” Yondu spits. “You’re so eager to go out and get yourself killed, be my guest.”

Peter can hardly believe his luck. “I can go out on jobs?” he asks.

“Yeah, boy, you can go out on jobs.”

“ _Real_ ones?”

“And what, exactly, is a ‘real’ job?” Yondu asks, looking very much like he’s regretting not only this whole conversation, but bringing Peter on board in the first place, and possibly Peter’s existence as a whole.

Peter waves the hand currently not occupied by his own blood. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, unfortunately I do.” Yondu sighs. “Next job we get, you can be part of the pick-up team. But, and I’m serious, boy, stop grinning like an idiot--” Yondu’s voice means business, so Peter tries to wipe the so-wide-it’s-painful smile off his face. “You do _exactly_ what you’re told, do I make myself clear? You fuck up, and you're grounded. Indefinitely. No shooting unless you’re told to shoot first, and _no talking_. I’m serious. I hear you’ve been firing your mouth off again, and I’ll make sure it’s closed permanently.”

Peter isn’t having much luck keeping the grin off his face. “I get it, Yondu. Absolutely, totally, one-hundred percent get it. You don’t have to worry about anything at all.”

“Yeah, yeah. Learn how to lie properly, boy. You’re a disgrace to my fleet. Now get out.”

Peter all but runs from the room, more excited than he can remember being since the first time he travelled down to an alien planet. A job. He’s going on a _job_.

He whoops loudly enough that several crew members poke their head out of the doors to see what’s going on.

“Fuck yeah!” he shouts in their surprised faces. “ _I’m going to steal some shit!_ ”

In the cockpit, Yondu groans and puts his face in his hands. “Fuuuuuuck.”

Kraglin finally loses the battle against containing his laughter.

 

* * *

 

Peter Quill at eighteen years old is trying to sweet-talk a girl in a bar on Knowhere.

It’s not the classiest bar he’s ever been in, though to be fair that’s a very, _very_ small list to begin with. Like most places on Knowhere, it’s is hot, and loud, and smells of unwashed bodies and spilt beer. The girl seems nice, though. Peter hadn’t recognized the name of her planet, which isn’t surprising considering how much of the galaxy he has left to see, but she seems mostly humanoid. You know, apart from the bright orange skin and red, full-iris eyes. So far, all Peter knows about her is that she’s physically his age, that she looks lovely when she smiles, and that she doesn’t mind him calling her ‘Jay’. He’s not sure what her real name is. He might have known several suspicious-colored beers ago, but more likely he just wasn’t paying attention when she told him. So sue him. It’s not often that Peter meets someone his own age, and even rarer that he meets someone he isn’t later planning to defraud.

It’s not that he’s _lonely_ , because it’s impossible to be alone on a Ravager ship even if you really, really want to be, it’s just…

Okay, Peter is totally lonely. If he were a slightly more virtuous man, he’d say he doesn’t even care whether or not this encounter gets him laid - he’s talking to someone who isn’t a Ravager or a Ravager contact, and that’s enough for him.

Not that this is going to dissuade him for trying to get laid, because he’s also eighteen years old and spends almost all of his time on a spaceship with a bunch of other dudes. Whilst he thinks that’s not quite a deal-breaker for him, the faces of the dudes in question certainly are. Ew. Also? _Ew_.

“So,” Peter says, trying to channel his best Han Solo. Unfortunately, his elbow slips on the surface of the bar and he has to catch himself before he falls out of his seat. “Shit! Shit, sorry. Shit, I said shit. I mean, uh… what brings you to Knowhere?”

Jay shrugs, but she’s smiling. “The usual, I guess. Good drinks and bad people.”

Peter raises his glass between thumb and forefinger, and then twitches as it tries to slip from his sweaty fingers. It’s _hot_ in here, okay? “I’ll drink to that,” he says. Okay, so maybe whatever the bartender had put in his glass is a little stronger than he’d first realized.

By the look on Jay’s face, she seems to have come to the same conclusion. She humors him, though, which is part of the reason Peter is talking to her in the first place. “What about you?”

“Oh, you know,” Peter affects nonchalance. That, at least, he can do with a measure of skill. “I’m what we in the business like to call a hero for hire.”

“Really.” Jay doesn’t seem convinced, but she looks like she _wants_ to be convinced. “And just what does that entail, exactly?”

Most men wouldn’t have an answer for this, but Peter has used the _hero for hire_ line so many times that he has one all ready to go. “Well, you know, it’s mostly bounty work.”

“So you’re a bounty hunter?”

“Well, if you want to get _literal_ about it,” Peter says. He watches Jay’s expression go flat and disinterested, and panics. “No, no, seriously, it’s… these are real bad guys, alright? Totally dangerous and… incredibly evil. I’ve probably saved a lot of lives just by bringing them in.”

Jay stirs her drink with the little, brightly-colored plastic stick that Peter is still trying to figure out the purpose of, and for a moment he’s distracted. Why _do_ they put that in there? More to the point, where do they _get_ it from? Is there a weekly delivery of small plastic sticks? Come to think of it, Peter isn’t sure where Jay got the stick from in the first place. This particular establishment is only a small step above a dive bar; you’re lucky to get _ice_ in your drink, let alone decorations. The first time Peter had come here, he had nearly started a bar-fight asking for a slice of lemon in his mildly corrosive beverage.

Aliens, man. Couldn’t take a joke.

It takes him a second to realize that Jay has said something, and that she’s now waiting for a response. Peter casts around for a few seconds for a bland, inoffensive answer that won’t give away the fact that he wasn’t paying attention, and comes up blank. Damn, he really is drunk.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as contritely as he can manage when the world is starting to double up. “Did you say something?”

“I said, you seem a little young for heroics.”

“And a little short for storm trooper?” Peter grins. Jay just stares at him. “Nothing? Damn, we’ve got to start doing movie nights out here or something. Hey, that’s an idea! How about you and me head back to my ship and catch a movie?”

Finally, Jay starts to look interested. “You have your own ship?”

Shit. _Shit_. “Uh… yeah! It’s called the… uh…” Peter glances around wildly. “Blue… uh… Punch! Yeah, the Blue Punch. But on second thoughts, maybe we shouldn’t go back. There’s a… uh… ship-wide visitor policy.”

“A visitor policy.”

“... yes?”

“For bounty hunters.”

“Seriously, we prefer ‘heroes for hire’, it’s kind of a nomenclature thing…”

Jay curls her long, elegant orange fingers under her chin and smiles. Peter is briefly distracted by the spill of her hair, which is long and thick and red. He wants to run his fingers through it so badly that they _itch_.

Oh jesus, he’s about to pop a boner in the middle of an alien dive bar.

“Or,” Jay says, drawing the word out into a delicious, sultry purr, “it could be because you don’t actually own your own ship. Or your own crew. Or that you’re not actually a bounty hunter at all, and that you’re just saying that to try and get into my pants.”

At Peter’s shocked stare, Jay smirks and nods to something behind him.

“Your, uh, crewmates have been watching us this whole time,” she says.

Peter turns around like a man walking to his own execution, slowly, and with a sense of rising dread. Sure enough, the entire crew of Yondu’s ship - including _Yondu himself_ \- are seated around one of the large, circular tables behind him. They’re watching Peter like he’s the most interesting thing in the room, kind of like how a pack of wild animals traditionally looks at prey items. Kraglin actually waves at him.

Peter is quite certain he’s never hated a living being as much as he does in that moment.

He turns back around with as much dignity as he can muster, which isn’t a lot. “Never seen them before in my life,” he says, which is more a fervent wish than a convincing lie.

“I know Ravagers when I see them,” Jay says, almost sympathetically. She grabs her jacket and slides down from her barstool. Peter doesn’t bother to try and stop her. It’s over, and he’s at least gracious enough to admit defeat. Perhaps Jay expects him to try and press the issue, because she gives him a smile that’s almost _fond_.

“The hero for hire thing was a nice touch,” she says. “Keep working on it. Maybe I’ll see you again when you’re all grown up.”

So saying, she leans up on her toes and kisses him on the cheek. She smells a little bit like leather, a little bit like booze, and a whole lot like the kinds of flowers that Peter never has the chance to stop and appreciate anymore. He closes his eyes and savours it.

His reaction doesn’t go unnoticed, and he feels Jay grin against his skin.

“Shame,” she says. “You were pretty sweet, for a Ravager.”

She walks away without a backwards glance.

Behind him, the Ravagers burst out laughing.

Peter blushes so hard that for a moment he’s afraid that his head is going to burst like a cartoon thermometer. He turns back to the bar and hunches over his drink, trying hard to ignore the idiots whooping like hyenas behind him. _I’m a hero for hire,_ someone falsettos. _Oooh, take me now!_  More laughter. Peter crunches an ice cube between his teeth.

The bartender throws him a mildly pitying glance. He thinks. It’s difficult to tell on a face that alien; he may very well be expressing his disgust over Peter’s complete lack of game.

He almost shrugs off the hand that slaps against his back, but he recognizes that deep chuckle, and he knows that shrugging it off will just end badly for him. Yondu takes up Jay’s recently-vacated chair, still laughing at Peter’s expense.

“A _bounty hunter_? Seriously, boy, we’ve got to work on your lines.” He wipes a tear from his eye that may or may not be imaginary. Does Yondu’s species have tear glands? Peter hopes one day to find out, preferably by kicking Yondu in the balls.

“So I struck out,” Peter says, a little grumpily. “It happens.”

“Seems to happen to you a lot more than anyone else,” Yondu’s voice is tart, but his palm is a reassuring weight between Peter’s shoulderblades. Peter allows himself to relax as Yondu signals for another drink for them both. The crew have mostly subsided now, the amusement of watching Peter fuck up having been short-lived. He supposes that’s a good thing: they’ve seen him fall on his ass so many times by now that the novelty is wearing thin.

For all that they laugh at him, for all their shitty, unfriendly habits, and for all their frankly nonexistent hygiene regimens, the Ravagers have looked after Peter since he was ten years old and all alone in the galaxy. They’ve given him a job, a home, and a steady supply of food. They’re his crew. So what if they rib on him sometimes? That’s what crews do. Since Peter would be nowhere if Yondu hadn’t decided to take him under his wing, he figures it’s fair exchange that he provides a little bit of entertainment every now and then.

Besides, the crew have mostly stopped stealing his walkman now, so he figures that means they’ve accepted him as one of them.

Peter Quill is eighteen years old and a professional thief. He has a ray gun on his belt and a drink that could melt solid steel in his hand. Behind him, there are ten or so men who will scrape him up off the floor of the bar later and deposit him in his bunk, albeit grudgingly. There, he’ll stare out of the single tiny, slightly filmy window, and watch as the universe turns around him. The stars will be the last thing he sees as he falls asleep, and the first thing he sees when he wakes up.

He’ll also have a hangover capable of bringing down a bull elephant, but hey, you couldn't win them all.

 


End file.
